Kenneth Mack

...Following Whitfield, fellow scholar Kenneth Mack brought the past into the present. Mack, a Harvard Law School classmate of President Barack Obama, now teaches at his alma mater. But racial challenges persist: Last fall, someone defaced portraits of Mack and other black professors with electrical tape. "There's a lot of work to be done," the educator said. That's one reason Mack has written "Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer," a history of the pioneering African-Americans who first fought for equality. "It is about a group of men and women who changed America," he told a Woodstock audience. "The past is more complicated than we think it is, and it helps us understand the present is more complicated than we think it is. To see what I'm getting at, you've got to hear the stories."

When Kenneth Mack was a student at Harvard Law School in the 1980s, the campus was a protest ground. It was a time when students and faculty strongly disagreed with each other — a time when the majority of professors were white men. Mack attended Harvard with Barack Obama. They were in the same class together and worked on the independent, student-run Harvard Law Review their second and third years...Mack will be in Woodstock to speak on Saturday for the annual Bookstock literary festival — a three-day event. He’ll be talking about his book, “Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer,” at 3 p.m.

Harvard Law Professor Kenneth Mack on President Obama's post presidency plans.

Passed by Congress 150 years ago (thanks in large part to Maine’s own William Pitt Fessenden), learn about its history and why it is cited in more litigation than any other amendment. Guests: Kenneth W. Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History, Harvard University. Patrick Rael, Professor of History, Bowdoin College.

A book review by Kenneth Mack. During her long and contentious life that spanned much of the twentieth century, Pauli Murray (1910–1985) involved herself in nearly every progressive cause she could find. Yet the contributions of this black woman writer, activist, civil rights lawyer, feminist theorist, and Episcopal priest have largely escaped public attention. Murray earned a reputation as an idealist who saw the world differently from many of the activists who surrounded her. She also walked away from several important organizations and movements when they were at the height of their influence. At the same time, her actions have seemed prescient to those involved in many of the social movements that have subsequently claimed a piece of her legacy. Through her friendships and writings, Murray left a long list of people deeply influenced by her, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, social activist Marian Wright Edelman, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Murray’s life story deserves to be made available to the larger public, but how does one do so in a way that honors her own obdurate unwillingness to be reduced to any clear set of vectors—to be, in effect, agreeable?

Forty acres and a mule. The order by Union General William T. Sherman in January 1865, just after the Civil War ended, to offer some recompense to newly freed slaves for the harms they had suffered was a radical, tantalizing promise that never came to be. More than 150 years later, the question of whether nations that benefited from the African slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries bear a responsibility to provide financial reparations for their crimes — as well as the lasting economic, social, and political damage they caused — remains unsettled. Many political and Civil Rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., have tried to gain traction for the idea periodically over the years, without much success...“This is not about retribution and anger, it’s about atonement; it’s about the building of bridges across lines of moral justice,” said Sir Hilary Beckles, a distinguished historian, scholar, and activist from Barbados, during a talk Monday at Harvard Law School...[Kenneth] Mack and [Annette] Gordon-Reed noted the many real-world opportunities in Boston and across the United States that exist right now for HLS students to facilitate getting reparations for black people through the legal system. “All of us derive a present-day benefit from the oppression, the degradation of human beings. And what should we do as an institution to make reparations for that” is what should be on everyone’s mind in thinking broadly about the concept of reparations, said Mack.

At a time when Harvard finds itself debating the ways controversial history is remembered on campus, Caribbean historian Hilary M. Beckles told a Harvard Law School audience the best way to deal with a thorny past is confronting it head on. “There’s no point in burying the legacy and memories,” Beckles said. “Let us bring everything to the surface and find a way forward through all of this.” Beckles was the keynote speaker at a panel discussion on reparatory justice for Caribbean countries that facilitated the slave trade, and was joined by other Harvard professors on the panel in the Law School’s Ames courtroom..Alexander J. Clayborne, a third-year Law School student who has helped organize protests, attended the event and said he found the talk “powerful,” especially as it pertained to both global and current events at Harvard...Professors Annette Gordon-Reed, Kenneth W. Mack, and Vincent Brown also participated in the panel.

Student-nominated speakers from across Harvard presented TED-talk style mini-lectures at the sixth annual “Lectures that Last” in front of a packed Memorial Church audience Saturday evening. With topics ranging from bilingualism to successful marriages, and from racial inclusion to economic development, the professors and deans on the stage challenged the audience to think differently about events in their everyday lives. The event was targeted for graduate students across the Harvard...In a speech that touched on recent race-related controversies at Harvard Law School, Law professor Kenneth W. Mack delved into the definition of inclusion. Some Law school students “have called for things that constitute a fundamental challenge to the rules that govern a University,” he said. “I think that those kinds of questions and those kinds of problems are entirely worthy of our attention.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Crimson editor Linda J. Greenhouse ’68 gave the second of three lectures in her series “Just a Journalist: Reflections on Journalism, Life, and the Spaces Between” on Wednesday. In her lecture, titled “Stories,” Greenhouse argued that the media’s overemphasis on objectivity diminishes its ability to present issues accurately. Greenhouse said there are several disturbing trends in the way stories are currently reported. For example, she described the way that journalists distance themselves from their work through tactics such as putting something they believe to be true in the words of someone else....The lecture series is sponsored by Harvard’s Graduate Program in American Studies. In his introduction to the talk, Harvard Law School professor Kenneth W. Mack praised Greenhouse’s deft reporting on the Supreme Court, coverage for which she is well known. “She’s someone that’s not shy about both informing us and making us think when she writes,” Mack said.

Maria Hinojosa, Ron Christie, Kenneth Mack, and Efrén C. Olivares join Melissa Harris-Perry to consider why some babies born in Texas are being denied birth certificates - even though the 14th Amendment should guarantee their citizenship.

Melissa Harris-Perry and her panel break [including Professor Kenneth Mack] down President Obama's unprecedented week, in which he addressed criminal justice reform, foreign policy, and more.

Harvard Law School Professor Kenneth Mack weighs in on President Obama's unprecedented remarks about rape allegations surrounding Bill Cosby.

Today’s interview is a guest post by Liah Love Caravalho, a program specialist in the Office of Legislative and External Relations of the Law Library of Congress. Below, Liah provides an interview with Kenneth W. Mack, inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard University. Prof. Mack was a speaker at the 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival, where he discussed his book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer. He is also the co-editor of The New Black: What Has Changed–and What Has Not–with Race in America. Please share your educational and academic background and specifically what made you decide that law was your true vocation? I started my professional life as an electrical engineer, designing computer chips at Bell Laboratories in the late 1980s after my graduation from Drexel University. I went to law school because I wanted to try something different. I liked technology, but I didn’t feel as though it was my life’s passion. This was, of course, before the development of the World Wide Web, social media, bio-engineering and other fields that now make technology seem like the place to be. I thought that law was my true calling almost from the day I started Harvard Law School. We seemed to be grappling with problems of inequality, politics, economics, policy and history–although we were doing it using lawyers’ tools. It was one of the most exciting periods in my life, and it just seemed completely different than engineering.

Valerie Jarrett is the most talked-about White House aide in Washington — and that’s not always a good thing. Jarrett has come under attack after the midterm elections, with critics charging that she wields too much influence over her boss. Part of her mystique stems from the fact that, as other top aides have come and gone, Jarrett has survived. Her longevity and proximity to President Obama and Michelle Obama have made her something of a Beltway legend — and have conjured up a series of misconceptions about her...Complaints about presidential advisers have a long tradition. “In almost every presidency you can name a powerful White House figure who had informal power of one kind or another that was the subject of dispute,” said Kenneth Mack, a Harvard historian. “Sherman Adams had an immense amount of power in Eisenhower’s White House; same with Harry Hopkins and Franklin Roosevelt.”

An op-ed by Kenneth W. Mack. If you want to know who to blame for any number of global and domestic crises, there is one simple answer, according to many critics: Barack Obama. The tide turned against many Democratic Congressional candidates in this year’s mid-term elections largely, some claim, because of President Obama’s relatively low approval ratings. Critics have charged Obama with indecision in the face of crises ranging from ISIS to Ebola. The seeming drift began soon after his second inaugural address – delivered only last year – when his ambitious call to collective action was quickly overtaken by a series of controversies ranging from the NSA surveillance leaks to the botched rollout of healthcare.gov. Yet a quick look back at history complicates the notion that these challenges are rooted in President Obama’s individual leadership deficiencies. It also illuminates a factor that does, indeed, make this president’s situation unique: the often-ignored fact that he is America’s first black president.

The other day, I attended an investiture ceremony for Robert Wilkins, an African-American judge recently appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At the ceremony, the Harvard Law Professor Ken Mack spoke about some of Judge Wilkins’s forebears—in particular, Robert Terrell, the first black federal judge, appointed in 1910, and William Henry Hastie, the first black federal Court of Appeals judge, appointed in 1949. These men served under, and swore to enforce, a federal Constitution that blessed racial segregation as “separate but equal.” As Mack said, Judges Terrell and Hastie had to be fair and just in a world that was neither fair nor just to them. Mack did not say but plainly implied that black judges today face a similar challenge—different in degree, to be sure, but not in kind.